Google just launched a labs project called SMS Channels. Seems very similar to what we’re doing with MyToday. What a coincidence…

I think it had to happen at some point considering the numbers we have. But, I wouldn’t really conclude that Google is taking on MyToday with this labs launch. My guess is that this is a 20% project and not a “let’s crush these midgets” type strategic move. Many Google products are born from 20% projects, so you never know how far they’ll take it. Either way, competition is always good and the attractiveness of the space got validated some more. Of course, whether competiton from Google is good is open to debate.

Update: Rajesh has posted an interview he gave on the competition from Google.

I’ve always been very interested in the history of the technology industry. An integral part of that history are the stories of the entrepreneurs who have successfully built the companies whose services we use or have heard about. Founders at Work is the first book in the “how they did it” genre of books that I read. There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from the experiences of people who have been successful at something, and Founders at Work did not disappoint. Though each journey is unique in its own way and there is never a recipe for success, irrespective of how one might define it, some qualities do come through. Some of my take aways were the perseverance, never give up attitude and realisation that one needs to constantly put themselves outside their zone of comfort to achieve something out of the ordinary. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Of course, some luck helps too.

I read Founders at Work some time last year, but pulled it out again after I came across two books in the same genre today. One is Entrepreneur Journeys by Sramana Mitra, and the other is Stay Hungry Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal. I’ve been reading their blogs for a long time now, and should enjoy the books too. But, they aren’t available on Flipkart (my online bookstore of choice these days), or a few other online stores I looked at. I’ll definitely keep an eye out though.

All the posts about results from 23andme in the last few months reminded me of a DNA analysis project by the National Geographic Society. The Genographic project is collecting data about the migratory history of the human species. It tries to determine how people ended up where they currently are from their origins in Africa (the ancestry of every human on earth can be traced back to Africa, according to the project). They had invited the general public to participate by buying a kit, and sending their DNA sample. In return, they would provide details about the origins of the participants and details of their haplogroup. Ever the willing participant in such experiments, my father had sent his DNA sample sometime in 2006 and received the results. I went back to the site to look at the results again recently in light of the renewed interest in DNA analysis.

The most interesting data obviously is the migration path from Africa, which is illustrated by the image below:

 I’ll just quote  from the Genographic Project report for more details about the haplogroup itself.

Your Y-chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup J2.

The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men, M168, and follow your lineage to present day, ending with M172, the defining marker of haplogroup J2, and also with the markers M47 (J2a), M12 (J2e), M67 (J2f), and M92 (J2f1).

From what I understand, haplogroups are a way of identifying branches in the human family tree, going all the way back to Africa 60,000 years ago, based on the mutations of the Y-chromosome that is passed from father to son. More details about the haplogroup J2 from Wikipedia. So, how did my ancestors migrate to south India?

If you look at the map highlighting your ancestors’ route, you will see that members of haplogroup J2 carry the following Y-chromosome markers:

M168 > M89 > M304 > M172

Today, descendants of this line appear in the highest frequencies in the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia, and at a much lower frequency in Europe, where it is observed exclusively in the Mediterranean area. Approximately 20 percent of the males in southern Italy carry the marker, along with ten percent of men in southern Spain.

So, most members of the haplogroup J2 migrated to the middle-east, Northern Africa and Southern Europe, but one of my ancestors separated from them at some point (maybe he was banished from the tribe ). Or, maybe many of them headed in a different direction.

One thing I’ve realised from what I’ve been reading is that genetics is a fascinating area of science, with the prospects for the future being both scary and very interesting.

A globally successful site built out of India in the last few years we can all be proud of (apart from Zoho) is SlideShare. It does one thing really well. Sharing slide shows. But, it looks like Google has taken a first step in competing with them. Of course, SlideShare does so much more at this point, but with a lot of Google products becoming “social” (like Reader), you never know. I guess it’s time for the SlideShare guys to put their heads down to out-innovate them, because there is no way a 16K people company with all their bureaucracy is going to keep up with a motivated start up. All the best to Amit and team.

I’ve always been a big fan of Paul Graham’s writing. His latest essay is about the power of being able to hold an entire program in one brain. Every manager has to read it. This excerpt really seemed familiar..

Someone has an idea for a new project, but because it’s not officially sanctioned, he has to do it in off hours—which turn out to be more productive because there are no distractions. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. Because it’s initially just an experiment, instead of a “production” language he uses a mere “scripting” language—which is in fact far more powerful. He completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn’t be justifiable for an official project, but this is a labor of love and he wants it to be perfect. And since no one is going to see it except him, he omits any comments except the note-to-self variety. He works in a small group perforce, because he either hasn’t told anyone else about the idea yet, or it seems so unpromising that no one else is allowed to work on it. Even if there is a group, they couldn’t have multiple people editing the same code, because it changes too fast for that to be possible.

I had written about the online DVD rental service Seventymm last year and how I came away rather disappointed. In the year since, they’ve been periodically contacting me about their latest offers. I always told them to call me back when they had a better offer, i.e, without a deposit, registration fee etc. They finally have a new offer now which costs Rs 995 for 6 months and 4 movies a month. I’ve signed up and have been using the service for a couple of months now. Expectedly, there are good and bad aspects to the service.

First the good -

1. The convenience – The USP of Seventymm and similar services is that the movies are delivered and picked up from your home, and they’ve completely lived up to this. I just have to add movies to my queue on their site and call them up whenever I want a pickup/delivery.
2. Customer service - Whenever I request a delivery somebody drops by at the promised time. They’ve been very punctual about this in the 3-4 times I’ve had movies delivered. They once mistakenly delivered a VCD of a movie when I had requested a DVD, and when I pointed out the mistake, offered an extra delivery without any additional charges. On a related note, I recommend that you always call them and not use the SMS or web modes of requesting a pickup/delivery. On the phone, you can specify what you want exactly and that prevents mistakes.
3. They provide multiple ways for you to reach them, and though I haven’t tried it, you can ask them to deliver movies to your home or office.
4. There have been no issues with the quality of the DVDs. I was initially apprehensive about unusable, scratched discs, but that hasn’t been a problem. Perhaps because they’re still a new service?
5. They’ve taken care of some of the no-brainer things I had mentioned in my previous post, like providing RSS feeds of latest movies added, better search and discovery etc.

Now the bad -

1. Reliability - This is a serious problem. Their site just throws up an ugly error page very often. It’s pretty much impossible to browse the site for titles for any decent amount of time without encountering a big “Runtime Error” page. Time to ditch ASP and use some proven technology?
2. Size of collection – Pretty good blockbuster movie coverage, but not many niche movies. I guess this will improve with time.
3. Broken rating system – As you’re browsing the site, every movie has a rating below the cover image denoting what I think is the average rating of the movie by other Seventymm users. The same interface allows you to specify your rating of the movie too which is displayed next to the average rating, and I think they use this information in their recommendation system. The big problem here is that I see many of those little numbers next to the average ratings of movies that I haven’t even watched. Surely some bug. I don’t know how good their recommendation system is, but this bug will surely be messing up all their data.
4. Usability – Never a strength of Indian websites, Seventymm doesn’t do too well here too. A simple example is the movie queue. How do you re-order the list to change your delivery priority? There’s a text box next to each movie with the current position in the queue. If you want to change the order, you have to manually change the number in all the textboxes to make it reflect your choice, which is a big pain if you have many movies in your queue. How difficult is it to provide a simple drag and drop interface when there are multiple Javascript libraries which make adding the feature very simple?

But, at the end of the day Seventymm is a useful service to me. It’s literally impossible to watch a movie in Bangalore on weekends unless you’ve planned it well in advance, and I’m finally catching up on all the movies I’ve missed!

Google recently killed the paid video downloads service, and told the people who have bought videos all these days that they can no longer view them. It’s yet another instance which shows why DRM is such a bad idea.

By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be. Most importantly, by pulling the plug on the service, Google proved why consumers have to be allowed to circumvent copy controls.

More at Ars.